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The Memory of Valerie is the central frame story arc (story within story) of
V for Vendetta. Valerie is never depicted except as a set-up, an illusion, a false memory, an unknowable history.
Valerie is similar to the laughing man in ghost in the shell. In the ghost in shell, the laughing man is an antagonist/villian that seems to arise from nothing and be embodied in no one,
http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Laughing_Man , a virus without an origin. However, where as the laughing man virus seems to emerge from a disconnect or gap (progress is not uniform leaving parts disconnected), Valerie is contagious because she is able to connect persons through her hope.
Although Valerie is encountered seemingly alive and embodied, in V for Vendetta, as a living character imprisoned with Evey, writing letters to Evey from the cell next door, this later turns out to be a simulation staged by V, a set-up to transmit an experience to Evey.
Following the end of Evey's capture and torture by V, V promises Evey that Valerie was real, and thus Valerie becomes a substantive memory, some sort of narrative of veracity or authenticity is made possible for Evey, through the subject retrieval (i.e, revelation of valery's biography) of Valerie. In a certain sense, V's mythography is also established in Evey in the same process.
Later in the plot it is revealed that V could have lied about being alongside valerie in prison. Thus V remains a mythos, even if Valerie was a real person, even if she died in prison, in the end, it is not certain what substantiates V's connection with Valerie.
One possible reading of V for Vendetta locates Valerie's memory as the main driver of the plot:
In this reading, the main protagonist of V for Vendetta is Valerie's transcribed mythos: a cluster of promises, fantasies of attachments and possible worldings that allow V, and then Evey, to go on living, and fighting, long after the actual social reality they inhabit has become unlivable.
When V dies at the end of
V For Vendetta, Evey concludes that it doesn't matter who V was, that 'the world needs V' whether V is actually alive or not, the implied ending of V for Vendetta is that Evey takes up V's costume and carries out with his final plans to bring the fascist government of england crashing down.
So, just as the laughing man has no origins, Valerie, as the foundational mythos, is a shade that never appears to have happened, but that nonetheless sustains V, gives V a
project. In face of an unlivable world, the project emerges, from nothing, or from a memory that never was, a myth, a narrative that gives V humanity as a figure concerned with delivering justice to society, even as that is hardly distinguishable from a plan for revenge on the fascists that tortured and experimented on him (supposedly).
In ghost in the shell, the laughing man presents itself as a virulent force, emerging from some sort of bug, or gap, in the techno-societal coding to threaten society in unexplained acts of violence. In V for Vendetta, Valerie is also lacking in substantive material origins, Valerie has no substance, no location is given veracity by the text (the text multiplies meanings beyond just an interpretation that valerie can be taken as an actual real event, a real character, person, she is an object of fantasy, a myth that gives life to to the subjectivities of V and Evey).
But where as the laughing man emerges from 'nowhere' from problems that have gone overlooked, an evil that emerges due to gaps between social and technological progress, Valerie emerges as a counter-weight to a real violence that took place deliberately: incarcertation, torture, all the dystopian fantasies of a fascist state, sexualized violence. Valerie, dehumanized though she is where she is encountered (in prison), as mythical as she is in the story, removed to a staging of a memory, ultimately gives humanity back to the world of V for Vendetta as she restores it to V tenuously (For she is long dead, if she was ever alive, by the time of the movie/comics' events): V's humanity is sustained as a project for revenge for Valerie against the fascists that tortured and starved her to death. At the end of the piece, V dies, leaving Evey, V's found protege, to carry out the final acts of V's plot. Evey becomes V, and finishes the revolution (the reader is left to assume) in so far as V has staged it.
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that was more or less my write up, i tried to clean it up again.